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Thursday, November 22, 2012

Two Sisters from Boston (MGM, 1946)

For last night’s “feature” I ran Charles Two Sisters from
Boston, an obscure but surprisingly
charming MGM musical, produced by Joe Pasternak and directed by Henry Koster
(the same team who had made Deanna Durbin a star with Three Smart
Girls at Universal in 1936, a decade before
this 1946 film) and starring Kathryn Grayson and June Allyson as the title
characters. The film is set in 1900 and begins at a staid tea party in Boston,
given by the Chandler family, where Martha Canford Chandler (June Allyson) is
playing piano in a terminally dull chamber work and everything is going along
at a snail’s pace of “correct” tedium when an officious young man announces to
Martha’s uncle Jonathan (Harry Hayden) and aunt Jennifer (Isobel Elsom) — this
seems to be yet another one of those movies in which teenagers have been palmed
off on their aunt and uncle, presumably because their parents died — that the
family’s name has been hopelessly disgraced. Both the dialogue and the demeanor
of the actor’s performance (he’s nice-looking and a quite powerful performer,
so it’s a real pity that we don’t see him again) are so reminiscent of a film
from four years earlier in which Tim Holt played a young man equally upset with
real or imagined blots on his family’s reputation that I immediately joked,
“Ah, The Magnificent Ambersons —
the musical!” No such luck, but the plot that did develop from this is quite witty in its own right.
It seems that the big scandal that threatens to disgrace the Chandler family
and cost uncle Jonathan his chance to be elected mayor of Boston is that
Martha’s sister Abigail (Kathryn Grayson) is working as a nightclub entertainer
at a sleazy spot called the Golden Rooster in the Bowery district of New York.
The Chandlers immediately set out for New York to find out if this is true and,
if it is, to pull Abigail from that unhealthy environment and drag her back to
Boston post-haste. Next we’re taken to the Golden Rooster, where Abigail is
billed as “High-C Susie” in a show MC’d and led from the piano by “Spike”
(Jimmy Durante, who looks startling at first because he has much more hair than
we’re used to seeing on him, but later we find out it’s a toupée when he takes
it off and reveals the typical Durante scraggle), singing songs as raunchy as
composer Sammy Fain and lyricist Ralph Freed could make them in a Production
Code-era movie and showing off her legs (‘her limbs,’ the shocked Chandlers say in disgust).

When her
folks from Boston come to visit, Abigail hatches a scheme to make them think
she’s actually appearing in the opera — and when they find a slip of paper on
the floor of her room with the name “The Golden Rooster” written on it, she
convinces them it’s really the name of an opera, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Le
Coq d’Or (which wasn’t written until 1907,
seven years after this film supposedly takes place). The Chandlers immediately
announce that they’re going to buy a ticket to that very night’s opera
performance so they can see Abigail — which leaves her the task of bribing,
flirting or bulling her way through onto the opera stage. She does that with
the help of “Spike,” whose modus operandi throughout the whole film is to whisper something in the ear of the
person he’s trying to influence — some deep dark secret he supposedly knows
about them — and invariably he hits on a location they were in when they did do something they wouldn’t want the world to know
about, and says his lips will be sealed if only they will … He manages to get
Abigail into the chorus of an opera (a rather lame faux-opera concocted by Charles Previn, the music
director, and Wilhelm von Wymetal, the opera director who got the call for a
lot of Hollywood’s forays into the operatic world — and who “Anglicized” his
name and is billed as “William Wymetal” here), where she steps out and
embarrasses herself and everyone else (though she impresses her family) by breaking
into a few coloratura bits in the middle of the big aria sung by tenor Olstrom
(Lauritz Melchior, the main reason I wanted to see this — not surprisingly, his
singing is acceptable in the faux-opera
bits but comes to life when he can actually sing Wagner, the bridal-chamber
duet between Lohengrin and Elsa in English translation and the Prize Song from Meistersinger in the original German, in a sequence supposedly
representing a recording session) and getting herself barred from the opera
house — to which she only got invited in the first place because “Spike” had
dropped hints she was the mistress of Patterson (Thurston Hall).

Meanwhile,
Patterson’s son (Peter Lawford) has fallen in love with Martha, and the plot
spirals out of control into complications that end with Martha claiming that she is “High C Susie” from the Golden Rooster (and
having to go on stage with a refractory non-voice to prove it!), Patterson fils being shocked that his new girlfriend would do
something so unbecoming and socially embarrassing, “Spike” hatching a new
scheme to get Abigail (back) into the opera by presenting her at a social event
being given by Patterson père and
his wife (Nella Walker) — which means he has to figure out a way to persuade
Olstrom, the guest of honor, not to attend (the moment he recognized Abigail he
would presumably order her out of there), along with an amnesiac butler at the
Patterson home (Ben Blue) who’s also a regular at the Golden Rooster and
therefore could also “out” Abigail, but he’s no threat if he’s kept sober
(since, at least according to this script, alcohol consumption gets his memory
to work again) — and there’s a final sequence in which Olstrom is starring in
another faux-opera called Marie
Antoinette, he’s playing Louis XVI (he’s
listed in the poster for this opera as a baritone even though Melchior was a
tenor) and Abigail (under a pseudonym) is going to play Marie Antoinette, and
she thinks she’s got away with her disguise until her costumer takes off her
wig for alterations, Olstrom recognizes her instantly, at first refuses to sing
with her but later relents, Abigail gets the opera career she’s wanted all
along (she only took the job at the Golden Rooster in the first place to make
money to pay for singing lessons, and unlike Jeanette MacDonald in San
Francisco and Dorothy Patrick in New
Orleans, she doesn’t discover a hot new kind of popular music she wants
to bring to the concert hall) and Patterson, Jr. gets Martha. It’s not much in
synopsis, but Myles Connolly’s script (with additional dialogue by James
O’Hanlon and Harry Crane) is a good one, full of witty bits (including the
sequence in which Olstrom’s dog, Tristan, hears the playback of Olstrom’s
record, assumes the classic RCA Victor/HMV trademark pose, and one of the
recording engineers gapes in awe and says, “His master’s voice … ”) and enough
variations on the old clichés we’re really not sure how it’s all going to turn
out.

And for those who wonder how a screen teaming between Lauritz Melchior and
Jimmy Durante would turn out, well, he’d earlier been teamed with Tommy Dorsey
and Buddy Rich in a previous MGM musical (Thrill of a Romance, also a Pasternak production) and he seemed to be
having a good time through the whole thing — in fact, around this time Melchior
was briefly signed with MGM Records as well as making films for the parent
studio. He’s properly avuncular and temperamental, but the film does do justice
to his voice (at least in the Wagner segments), and the depiction of a 1900
recording session was accurate in part (the master record is recorded on a zinc
blank which can be put immediately into a metal bath and played back — later
wax blanks were used, which sounded better but required major off-site
processing and couldn’t be listened to for about three weeks after the record
was made — and the producer of the session is shown pulling Melchior back when
he’s about to sing loudly and pushing him closer to the recording horn when he
sings softly — this was so the record would reproduce at an even volume and a
loud note wouldn’t cause the cutting stylus to vibrate so violently that it
would slice through the adjoining grooves, ruining the record) and
anachronistic in part (he’s accompanied by a small orchestra, with string
players using normal instruments instead of Stroh violins — though in 1900 the
frequency range that could be recorded was so narrow most opera records were
made with no instruments at all except a piano). I hadn’t had much hope for
this movie — I was mainly watching it as a relatively minor Melchior credit in
between the Esther Williams Technicolor extravaganzae Thrill of a
Romance and This Time for Keeps — but it turned out to be graceful, witty and
genuinely charming, a triumph of style over (lack of) substance and yet more
evidence that Henry Koster was a genuinely creative director and not just
another studio hack.